Just once you suppose you’ve seen all of it earlier than, director Abdellatif Kechiche goes and drops one thing as toxically indulgent as “Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo,” a three-and-half-hour-long provocation that may now make the “Blue Is the Warmest Color” director essentially the most talked-about man on the Croisette as soon as once more — and never in a great way.
This basically narrative-free sequel to 2017’s “Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno” (nonetheless unreleased within the U.S., and boy this newest enterprise isn’t going to assist issues there) takes the already sporadically clothed forged of that earlier movie, plops them onto a seashore for the preliminary 30 minutes, strikes them to a membership for the following three hours, leers at each crevice of their our bodies alongside the way in which after which calls it a day.
Squint laborious sufficient and you’ll see what he’s going for. Instead of rising the slight narrative seeds he planted with “Canto Uno,” which adopted a decent circle of Franco-Algerian younger adults over the course of the summer season of 1994, right here Kechiche merely needs to embed you with them over the course of 1 lengthy late-summer evening, shifting from the seashore to the membership to one another’s arms. In different phrases, earlier than persevering with the narrative (i.e. “Canto Due”), let’s simply stay with them within the second earlier than shifting on. Intermission time!
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But whose second are we actually dwelling? I imply, no single scene or shot is ever greater than a minute or two away from one other tight close-up of a booty in movement, often clad in cut-offs quick sufficient to depart no a part of the actors’ anatomies to the creativeness.
Though we choose up the younger forged from “Canto Uno,” the newest movie’s actual stars are the twerk, the pole-dance, the hump and the grind, and Kechiche makes positive to place all of them on ample show for three-and-a-half hours. Add up nothing however the photographs of jiggling butts and also you’ll have an hour’s price of footage.
Kechiche took greater than his justifiable share of flak for the sexual frankness of “Blue Is the Warmest Color” and “Canto Uno,” however in each circumstances he may argue that the lasciviousness on display was a pure outgrowth of the bigger setting he sought to evoke. The dude can’t make that argument right here, the place there’s no different setting to talk of.
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More than anything, the movie appears like a large troll, a libidinous F–you to each one of many director’s critics. In amplifying all the things deemed problematic about his earlier work whereas stripping away all of their saving graces, Kechiche has principally thrown down the gauntlet and made a movie that’s almost unattainable to critique.
Put it this fashion: To criticize “Intermezzo” for spending too lengthy obsessing on gyrating booties and glistening younger flesh can be about as efficient as criticizing Andy Warhol’s experimental movie “Empire” for less than taking pictures one constructing in Midtown Manhattan — that’s the film’s very level!
As if stung by moral questions relating to the acrobatic bed room feats in “Blue Is the Warmest Color” and the brazenly expressed considerations about how a lot of the onscreen motion was simulated, right here he leaves no room to query, staging a 12-minute-long bathroom-floor cunnilingus sequence that goes out of its approach to show its authenticity. Just what does this resoundingly pornographic break provide the bigger movie by way of theme? Who can actually say, however it’s going to positive rile the prudes and tut-tutters.
It definitely will try this, all whereas making the movie all however unreleasable. But there we are able to discover the movie’s actual perverse cost — in watching a as soon as acclaimed director self-immolate in actual time. Kechiche will little question argue that this scuzzy entr’acte is only a prelude for the extra substantial deliberate sequel “Canto Due” (the footage of which he’s…
